Andrew Pulver 

Dunkirk spirit: British talent well represented again at 2018 Oscars

Academy Awards feature nominations for 30 Britons including actors, directors and designers
  
  

Lesley Manville in Phantom Thread
Lesley Manville in Phantom Thread, for which she has received a best supporting actress nomination. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/AP

A significant British presence at the Oscars has been a Hollywood fixture for decades – reaching back to the very first ceremony in 1929, when Charlie Chaplin was given an honorary award for his silent-era blockbuster The Circus.

The 2018 crop finds room for a solid 30 British nominees: from actors such as Gary Oldman, Sally Hawkins, Lesley Manville and Daniel Kaluuya to behind-the camera talent including the director Christopher Nolan, costume designer Jacqueline Durran (competing against herself for Darkest Hour and Beauty and the Beast), and cinematographer Roger Deakins (hoping to break his 13-film losing streak with Blade Runner 2049). Two very British films – Dunkirk and Darkest Hour – have made considerable headway, and there is the usual sprinkling of Brits attached to heavyweight Hollywood projects: producers, visual effects artists and the like.

This year’s numbers are a little up on last year’s, when 24 British nominees attended, but well down on 2016’s, when there were 53 and The Danish Girl was arguably the highest-profile UK production at the Oscars. It cannot be a coincidence, however, that the two headline British films this year trade in nostalgia for second world war stiff upper lip: Nolan’s Dunkirk and the Churchill biopic Darkest Hour. Fionnuala Halligan, the chief critic for UK film industry magazine Screen, says their success is a reaction to “today’s more tangled moral mores”.

“The heroics of Dunkirk and Darkest Hour give the idea of a time when things were more simple, when there was a single enemy that great men could attempt to defeat,” she said. The veteran producer Stephen Woolley, whose latest project, Colette, has just premiered successfully at the Sundance film festival, points out that “nostalgic British period movies have always been Oscar favourites – from Chariots of Fire to The King’s Speech to Atonement.”

But the enduring presence of British craftspeople in the various technical categories is less of a testament to the popularity of individual films or actors than to the maintenance of a tradition that goes back at least to the 1940s. “It’s terrific that British actors seem to be all the rage in US movies,” says Woolley, “but that’s not necessarily an indication that the British film industry in is in good shape. Brits quite rightly have a phenomenal reputation for film crafts, which is why Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter etc are all shot in the UK.”

If there’s a specific point of excitement around British manifestation at the Oscars, it is the nomination of the Get Out lead Daniel Kaluuya as best actor – despite his Britishness initially appearing something of a handicap, after attracting negative comments from Samuel L Jackson for not being “an American brother”. Along with Timothée Chalamet, Kaluuya seems to represent the arrival of a new generation: not simply because of his age (Kaluuya is 28, Chalamet 22), but also because of the role it plays in the culture war that is still convulsing Hollywood.

Ben Roberts, the director of the BFI Film Fund, said it “makes the unthinkable seem possible for others”. He added: “Daniel is not acting royalty, but it’s not a fluke either – he has been working hard in theatre, film and TV, so it is very exciting and inspiring.”

Halligan, too, is full of praise: “He’s not an overnight success – there’s a lot of graft gone into that. The idea that up-and-coming British actors are all public school-educated is no longer the case: Daniel grew up on a council estate, like Callum Turner and John Boyega. That’s what Brits are famous for – hard work and craft.”

The Academy Awards take place on 4 March in Los Angeles.

 

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